RIGHTS-US:School Recruiting Could Violate Int'l ProtocolBy Jim LobeWASHINGTON, May 13 (IPS) - Pressed by the demands of the "global war on
terrorism", the United States is violating an international protocol that
forbids the recruitment of children under the age of 18 for military service,
according to a new report released Tuesday by a major civil rights group that
charged that recruitment practices target children as young as 11 years old.

The 46-page report, "Soldiers of Misfortune", which was prepared by the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for submission to the U.N. Committee on the Rights
of the Child, also found that the U.S. military disproportionately targets poor
and minority public school students.

Military recruiters, according to the report, use "exaggerated promises of
financial rewards for enlistment, [which] undermines the voluntariness of their
enlistment." In some cases documented by the report, recruiters used coercion,
deception, and even sexual abuse in order to gain recruits. Perpetrators of such
practices are only very rarely punished, the report found.

"The United States military's procedures for recruiting students plainly violate
internationally accepted standards and fail to protect youth from abusive and
aggressive recruitment tactics," said Jennifer Turner of the ACLU Human Rights
Project.

The increased aggressiveness of military recruiters is due in major part,
according to the report, to the increased pressure to meet enlistment quotas
caused by ongoing U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to which
nearly 200,000 soldiers and marines are currently deployed.

The pressure created by current military commitments has not only translated
into enhanced recruitment efforts among children under 18. The armed forces have
also lowered their standards for minimum-intelligence tests, made it easier to
enlist individuals with criminal records, and increased re-enlistment bonuses
for soldiers who might otherwise be tempted to leave the service.

The report, which also detailed Washington's failure to protect foreign child
soldiers being held by U.S. forces at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and
elsewhere around the world as part of its submission to the U.N. Committee on
the Rights of the Child, assesses Washington's compliance with the Optional
Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict.

The Protocol, which is attached to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, is
designed to protect the rights of children under 18 who may be recruited by the
military and deployed to war.

Among other provisions, the Protocol sets an absolute minimum age for
recruitment of 16 and requires that all recruitment activities directed at
children under 18 be carried out with the consent of the child's parents or
guardian, that any such recruitment be genuinely volunteer, and the military
fully inform the child of the duties involved in military service and require
reliable proof of age before enlistment.

While the United States is one of only two countries -- the other being Somalia
-- to have never ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.S.
Senate ratified the Protocol in 2002, making it binding under U.S., as well as
international, law. Unlike most other industrialised countries that set their
minimum recruitment age at 18, the Senate decided on 17 as the absolute minimum
for the United States.

According to the ACLU report, however, the U.S. armed services "regularly target
children under 17 for military recruitment, heavily recruiting on high school
campuses, in school lunchrooms, and in classes."

The army's own Recruiting Programme Handbook, for example, instructs its more
than 10,600 recruiters to approach high school students as early as possible,
and explicitly before their senior year, which, for most students, starts at age
17. "Remember, first to contact, first to contract...that doesn't just mean
seniors or grads...," according to an excerpt quoted in the report. "If you wait
until they're seniors, it's probably too late."

Once recruiters are inside their assigned high schools, the Army's Recruiting
Command instructs them to "effectively penetrate the school market" and "(b)e so
helpful and so much a part of the school scene that you are in constant demand",
with the goal of "school ownership that can only lead to a greater number of
Army enlistments." That includes volunteering to serve as coaches for high
school sports teams, involvement with the local Boy Scouts, attending as many
all school functions and assemblies, and even "eating lunch in the school
cafeteria several times each month".

The report documents a number of specific cases, mostly in New York and
California -- the two most populous states with the largest number of minority
high school students -- in which recruiters clearly followed these instructions.
In a survey of nearly 1,000 children, aged 14 to 17, enrolled in New York City
high schools, the ACLU New York affiliate found that more than one five
respondents -- equally distributed among the different grades -- reported the
use of class time by military recruiters, and 35 percent said military
recruiters had access to multiple locations in their schools where they could
meet students.

The report also noted that the Pentagon's central recruitment database
systematically collected information on 16-year-olds and, in some cases even
15-year-olds, including their name, home address and telephones, email
addresses, grade point averages, height and weight information, and racial and
ethnic data obtained from a variety of public and private sources. The explicit
purpose of the database is to assist the military in its "direct marketing
recruiting efforts". As the result of a 2006 ACLU lawsuit, the Pentagon agreed
to stop collecting data about students younger than 16.

But recruitment efforts even dip below 15-year-olds, according to the report,
which found that the Pentagon's Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), which
operate at more than 3,000 junior high schools, middle schools, and high schools
across the country, target children as young as 14 for recruitment. The report
cited recent studies that found that enrollment in some JROTC programmes was
involuntary.

JROTC "cadets", of whom there were nearly 300,000 in 2005, receive military
uniforms and conduct military drills and marches, handle real and wooden rifles,
and learn military history, according to the report, which noted that the
programme is explicitly designed to "enhance recruiting efforts". African
American and Latin students make up 54 percent of JROTC programmes.

JROTC also oversees the Middle School Cadet Corps (MSCC), in which children ages
11 to 14 can participate, according to the report. Florida, Texas, and Chicago
schools offer military-run after-school MSCC programmes in which children take
part in drills with wooden rifles and military chants, learn first-aid, civics,
military history and, in some cases, wear uniforms to school for inspection once
a week.

The Army also uses an online video game, called "America's Army", to attract
potential recruits as young as 13, train them to use weapons, and engage in
virtual combat and other military missions. Launched in 2002, the video game had
attracted 7.5 million registered users by September 2006.

"Military recruitment tools aimed at youth under 18, including Pentagon-produced
video games, military training, corps, and databases of students' personal
information, have no place in America's schools," said Turner.